Better than mediocre zombie/disaster movie

Rating: 6/10 (3 February 2007)

Horror movies. To be honest, the great majority of them are pretty darn bad. The zombie movie: conceived by George A. Romero with The Night of the Living Dead and followed by countless clones and sequels. Most of these, like most horror movies, are pretty bad. At least Romero's films had some measure of social commentary to balance out the general ridiculousness of the films.
28 Days Later does nothing to restore my confidence in zombie movies or horror movies as a whole. A disease breaks out and turns people into rabid killing machines hell-bent on killing all living people (but not each other). The dialogue in the film doesn't do a whole lot to help it make too much more sense. Then a handful of survivors try to... well... survive.
Sound familiar? Yep. The zombie movie genre is actually a cross-genre hybrid of the disaster movie and the horror movie. Lots of spooky scares from zombies popping up everywhere and general gotta-survive-at-the-end-of-the-world tenseness. And it's tense and there are plenty of spookies to keep the audience trembling in their seats. The film (after the weak introduction) starts off pretty well, showing a post-apocalyptic London.
Unfortunately, the film falls victim to a pair of problems that are opposed to each other. First of all, the setup takes a long time. There's a lot of running around with little character development. Second, the last act of the film introduces the film's "larger themes" which really serve against itself. I think if the characters were better developed and the story more thoughtfully wrought, then it would've been fine, but it all just drops out of nowhere and is almost a second story in itself. A lot of the development that happens in the first two-thirds of the film gets annihilated in the last third because the film takes a very different turn. And in it all, it tries to make a statement about the nature of humanity, but it's really cliché and poorly drawn out. Oh yeah, like many other horror movies, there are shower scenes and quite a bit of basic nudity, courtesy of the male lead's character.
The direction and the photography isn't bad, although it stumbles here and there. The acting ranges from just passable to mediocre. The movie has cute references to other films and sources, which is neat if you can get them. But in the end, this is a slightly-better-than-mediocre horror film. It's okay for a once-over but I can't really recommend it. 6/10.